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Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Fund Private Elementary Schools
theodp writes: AltSchool, a 2-year-old software-fueled private elementary school initiative started by an ex-Googler, announced Monday a $100 million Series B round led by established VC firms and high-profile tech investors including Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, John Doerr, and Pierre Omidyar. AltSchool uses proprietary software that provides students with a personalized playlist lesson that teachers can keep close tabs on. Currently, a few hundred students in four Bay Area classrooms use AltSchool tech. Three more California classrooms, plus one in Brooklyn, are expected to come online this fall, plus one in Brooklyn. "We believe that every child should have access to an exceptional, personalized education that enables them to be happy and successful in an ever-changing world," reads AltSchool's mission statement. For $28,750-a-year, your kid can be one of them right now. Eventually, the plan is for the billionaire-bankrolled education magic to trickle down. AltSchool's pitch to investors, according to NPR, is that one day, charter schools or even regular public schools could outsource many basic functions to its software platform.
Fuck trickle down economics. Schools should be mandatory. Schools should be funded equally. And if rich fuckers want a better education for their kids, key them improve the whole system.
This is a great way of creating a caste system like what already happens on the east coast if you didn't go to some fancy prep school.
As much as I hate government, this is a good place to apply heavy regulation, at least in terms of funding and talent disparities.
Different meaning of the word 'trickle down.' It's like a new technology......electric cars were primarily available to rich Tesla drivers, but the 'technology' is 'trickling down' as it becomes cheaper. Same thing happened with microwaves and plenty of other technologies.
You could have figured this out, but he's saying that if their school is successful, other schools will start using it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Given the quality of educational software I've seen, if they are depending on software to teach kids, I can't imagine this being a success.
As in, I've never seen any educational software that is good, and it only gets worse as the scope increases.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The beginning of the headline is a tad misleading
Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Fund Private Elementary Schools
Would the same wording have been used in this instance.
Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Fund Uber
No, right? This isn't a gift. It's an investment. Also, the fund is going to a single company called AltSchool.
I know a better headline I'd like to see: "New fair taxes enable feasible education budget. Donations not neccesary anymore." How about that, hu? ... Just saying sometimes I'm glad I live in Germany (allthough taxation could use a redo here aswell).
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's a curious middle-class conceit that people who work in jobs think they know everything there is to know about the socio-political situation around their industry. Teachers commenting on education policy is no more interesting per se than policemen commenting on laws. And you're not even a regular policeman, you're a rich well-paid policeman who looks after a small gated community that is law-abiding, and your solution to crime is basically that everyone should be rich like these guys then there wouldn't be a problem.
the ideal is a meritocracy- if you work hard, you're rich. if you don't work, you're poor
that's the ideal
of course reality means we have rich kids who don't do shit and can't fail, or whose dad gets them a cushy do nothing job with his friends at the golf club
it also means there are poor people who are busting their asses at two full time jobs who will never get ahead, barely tread water, and are one accident or medical problem away from losing everything, due to depressed wages because of power imbalances, and an insane healthcare system. and poor people on assistance who don't work simply because the financial incentive is to stay not working: it pays more
so we do not live in a meritocracy
we should, of course. and we should try to model our society on that ideal
and one way we do that is we guarantee a baseline of medical care and education to everyone
but if being poor means your education will be pathetic, you'll stay poor. and if you're rich and are a loser flunkie who never tries in school but still gets ahead due to connections
we WANT to subsidize poor people's healthcare and education, so we can actually and honestly say "you're poor because you don't try." we can't say that with honesty today. if we don't actually have everyone STARTING on level ground. the ideal of meritocracy requires everyone to start at roughly the same spot. then, indeed, you can criticize people for being poor, and laud people for being rich. rather than our increasing classist reality in the usa of a shirnking middle class, a rich kid who cannot fail and does nothing, and a poor person who cannot succeed and works his ass off
in fact, the usa is not the world leader in social mobility, the ability of the poor to get ahead by hard work
that title goes to "gasp" nordic countries, evil "socialist" countries, where people are happier and richer than "capitalist" america, which really isn't capitalist in the meritocratic sense, but more like plutocratic rent-seeking, social darwinistic fuck-you-i-got-mine-die-in-the-street america
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Many argue that public schools are failing our children, but few agree on the cause, so standardized tests have been rolled out to evaluate and quantify the various levels of achievement in the various school systems at both the state and federal level.
That in and of itself isn't really a problem, the problem (IMHO) with standardized testing is that it has become the only way to evaluate career teachers since the teachers and their union groups have typically rejected every other form of teacher evaluation.
For example, in one famous example a new superintendent walked into a major metropolitan school system and was confronted with the reality that some 60% of high school graduates failed to perform at an 8th grade level, yet some 90% of the teachers had peer-evaluated each other to be 'Excellent' teachers.
The issue isn't standardized testing, it is the importance the test results have to the teachers that causes great stress in the children.
Ken
What exactly constitutes "passive welfare"? Since welfare was reformed under that reactionary libertarian President Clinton, everyone that receives cash assistance is required to either work or attend job training 30 hours a week, or lose their benefits. Which is awesome on paper if you want to fix the "problem" of welfare queens (which have not been proven to exist in significant numbers), but in reality it creates more problems, one of which is what to do with your kids while you're working or going to job training. Not everyone has a spouse or family that can watch the kids while you're off at your dead-end McJob making minimum wage.
Everyone who is able-bodied should work, in an ideal situation. In the real world, you can't always get a job when you need one, and if you have to pay for day care, sometimes having a job means you have LESS money to work with than if you were sitting at home on the couch like everyone on the right thinks welfare recipients do. Lots of people think the poor should be punished for being so, so the situation continues. There's a school of thought that providing cash benefits perpetuates a cycle of poverty, that it encourages dependence instead of personal responsibility. The truth is that most people on cash assistance are trying desperately to get a job so they can stop collecting benefits, and forcing an arbitrary work requirement on them does nothing more than 1) make the situation worse for the recipients and their children, and 2) provide Big Biz with a captive audience of low-wage workers who can't quit when you treat them like dogshit. When you factor in the low wages, lack of access to health insurance (as even under the ACA a lot of people have to make a sizable payment each month for even the lowest level of coverage), and cultural stigma (which, ironically, makes it HARDER to get a job due to the perception of welfare recipients being goldbricking leeches), welfare DOES make people dependent by perpetuating the vicious cycle of trapping low-wage workers in their jobs, not because they're lazy. The solution is not to end welfare, but to increase wages enough to shift the burden from public assistance to private wages. This is one reason why people want the minimum wage increased; a living wage gets people off welfare. But, since that eats into the profits (which are still at record highs), Big Biz just instructs their wholly owned "elected" representatives to perpetuate the myth of the lazy welfare recipient who leeches off taxpayers' hard work. After all, it's much better for the CEO to buy his third summer home with his six-figure bonus for keeping salaries low than for the workers at his business who do actual work to have enough money to live on.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.